Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/66

52 South African War, it is impossible to speak of Cecil Rhodes at this moment with judicial impartiality. I knew him too intimately and loved him too well to care to balance his faults against his virtues or to lay a critical finger upon the flaws in the diamond. For with all his faults the man was great, almost immeasurably great, when contrasted with the pigmies who pecked and twittered in his shade. To those who are inclined to dwell more upon the wide-wasting ruin in which his fatal blunder involved the country that he loved, it may be sufficient to remark that even the catastrophe which was wrought by his mistake may contribute more to the permanent welfare of the Empire than all the achievements of his earlier life.

Mr. Rhodes’s last Will and Testament reveals him to the world as the first distinguished British statesman whose Imperialism was that of Race and not that of Empire. The one specific object defined in the Will as that to which his wealth is to be applied proclaims with the simple eloquence of a deed that Mr. Rhodes was colour-blind between the British Empire and the American Republic. His fatherland, like that of the poet, is coterminous with the use of the tongue of his native land. In his Will he aimed at making Oxford University the educational centre of the English-speaking race. He did this of set purpose, and in providing the funds necessary for the achievement of this great idea he specifically prescribed that every American State and Territory shall share with the British Colonies in his patriotic benefaction.

Once every year “Founder’s Day” will be celebrated at Oxford; and not at Oxford only, but wherever on the broad world’s surface half-a-dozen old “Rhodes scholars” come together they will celebrate the great ideal of Cecil Rhodes—the first of modern statesmen to grasp the sublime conception of the essential unity of the race. Thirty years hereafter there will be between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom will have had impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder.

It is, therefore, well to put on record in accessible form all available evidence as to the nature of his dream.

What manner of man was this Cecil Rhodes who has made